Minnesota, to Mississippi, Arkansas, and eastern Texas. They
predominate even in parts of such prairie States as Michigan,
Indiana, southern Illinois, and southeastern Missouri. No part of
the continent is more populous or more progressive than the
regions once covered by deciduous forests. In the United States
nearly sixty per cent of the inhabitants live in areas reclaimed
from such forests. Yet the area of the forests is less than a
quarter of the three million square miles that make up the United
States.

In their relation to human life the forests of America differ far
more than do either grass-lands or deserts. In the far north, as
we have seen, the pine forests furnish one of the least favorable
environments. In middle latitudes the deciduous forests go to the
opposite extreme and furnish the most highly favored of the homes
of man. Still farther southward the increasing luxuriance of the
forests, especially along the Atlantic coast, renders them less
and less favorable to mankind. In southern Mexico and Yucatan the
stately equatorial rain forest, the most exuberant of all types
of vegetation and the most unconquerable by man, makes its
appearance. It forms a discontinuous belt along the wet east
coast and on the lower slopes of the mountains from southern
Yucatan to Venezuela. Then it is interrupted by the grasslands of
the Orinoco, but revives again in still greater magnificence in
the Guianas. Thence it stretches not only along the coast but far
into the little known interior of the Great Amazon basin, while
southward it borders all the coast as far as southern Brazil. In
the Amazon basin it reaches its highest development and becomes
the crowning glory of the vegetable world, the most baffling
obstacle to human progress.